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Have I taken enough factors into consideration? Have I done all that should be done? And then he started trembling.
This was the fall of man, of course; this is what is meant. Lao Tzu says, “When the great Tao lost, there came duty to man and right conduct.” In other words, nobody talks about how you ought to behave unless things have gone radically wrong. There wouldn’t be any conception of faithful ministers of the state unless there are a lot of lousy politicians around.
No one would talk about filial piety unless there were wayward sons and daughters. So there is constantly, in the tradition of Taoism, the idea that all moral preaching is confusion. There’s a marvelous case of this in the Zhuang Zhou book, where there’s an alleged conversation between Confucius and Lao Tzu in which Lao Tzu asks Confucius to explain to him: what is charity and duty to one’s neighbor?
And Confucius gives him a little sermon, you know, on giving up one’s self-interest and working for others. And Lao Tzu says, “What stuff! Sir, regard the universe.” He says, “The stars come out invariably every night.
The sun rises and sets. The birds flock and migrate without exception. All flowers and trees grow upwards without exception.
You—by or talk of charity and duty to one’s neighbor—you’re just introducing confusion into the empire. Your attempt to eliminate self is a positive manifestation of selfishness. You are like a person beating a drum in search of a fugitive.” The modern equivalent of that would be the police car about to raid a bad night club and coming with that siren full on, you see?
And everybody in the club gets out. So all talk about selfishness—all talk about success in becoming virtuous, or enlightened, or integrated, or non-neurotic, or self-actualized; all the terms that are being used, all this talk—attests to the fact that it hasn’t happened, and will, in fact, get in the way of its happening. Well, to go back to Liezi, who succeeded in riding the wind: what happened?
Liezi found a very great master and went to study with him. And the master lived in a small hut, and Liezi sat outside the hut. And the master paid absolutely no attention to him.
This is sort of the way with Taoist masters, because why would they want students? They have nothing to teach. So after a year sitting outside, Liezi went away.
And he [was] just fed up with waiting so long. Then he sort of got regretful about this and thought he really should make a try. So we went back to the master who said, “Why this ceaseless coming and going?” So he sat there and tried to control his mind in such a way that he would not think of the differences between gain and loss.
In other words: try to live in such a way that nothing is either an advantage or a disadvantage. Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. And all the neighbors came around to commiserate that evening.
“So sorry to hear your horse has run away. That’s too bad.” And he said, “Maybe.” The next day, the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and everybody came around in the evening and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky! What a great turn of events.
You’ve now got eight horses.” And he said, “Maybe.” The next day, his son tried to break one of these horses and ride it, and was thrown and broke his leg. And they all said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad!” And he said, “Maybe.” The following day the conscription officers came around to recruit people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. And all the people came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” And he said, “Maybe.” You see, that is the attitude of not thinking of things in terms of gain or loss, advantage or disadvantage—because you don’t really know.
The fact that you might get a letter from a solicitor, I mean from a law office tomorrow, saying that some distant relative of yours had left you a million dollars might be something you would feel very, very happy about. But the disasters that it could lead to are unbelievable. Internal Revenue, to mention only one possibility!
So you never really know whether something is fortune or misfortune. We only know the momentary changes as it alters our sense of hope about things. A Taoist is wise enough—eventually, you see—to understand that there isn’t any fixed good or bad.
And so his point of view is what is called “non-choosing.” Well, anyway, Liezi attempted to keep his mind in a state of non-choosing. And this was a very difficult thing to do, to overcome one’s habits of feeling and thinking in this respect. And after he had practiced this for a year, the master looked at him—you know, sort of recognized he was there.
After another years’ practice he invited him to come and sit inside his hut. And then, however, something changed, and Liezi didn’t try any more to control his mind. What he did was, he put it in this way: “I let my ears hear whatever they wanted to hear.
I let my eyes see whatever they wanted to see. I let my feet move wherever they wanted to go. And I let my mind think of whatever it wanted to think.” And then he said, “It was a very strange sensation because all my bodily existence seemed to melt, and become transparent, and to have no weight.
And I didn’t know whether I was walking on the wind or the wind was walking on me.” Now, that’s the fasting of the heart. In the ordinary way, you see, you say, “Well, that made quite an impression on me,” as if you were a slate or a blackboard upon which life makes an impression, as the chalk does on the slate or the blackboard. And so we say, “Well, here are these events.
And I’m the observer of all these events. And I remember them and they make an impression on me.” But in the psychology of Taoism there is no difference between you, as observer, and whatever it is that you observe. The only thing that is you is the observation of life from a certain point of view.
I said a little while ago you think your heads are empty and blank. But the actual inside of your head is felt in terms of everything you see on the outside. We make an opposition, you see, between the thinker and the thought, the experiencer and the experience, the knower and the known.
Because we think about knowledge in terms of certain metaphors: the metaphor of the stylus on the writing sheet, the reflection on the mirror. All those sort of images come into our idea of knowledge. But in the Taoist theory of knowledge it’s quite different.
There isn’t a knower facing the known. It would be more like saying that, if there is any knower at all, it contains the known. Your mind—if you have one—is not in your head, your head is in your mind.
Because your mind (understood from the standpoint of vision) is space. The Chinese use this word, kōng (空), which means “sky,” “space,” and sometimes “emptiness.” And there is a saying that form—or, you know, shape and color—was of this is one word in Chinese that means, really, both shape and color. And these are said to be identical.
Space or emptiness is precisely shape-color, and shape-color is precisely emptiness. This is actually a Buddhist saying from the Hṛdaya Sūtra. So that all that we call space contains the myriads of shapes and colors, and bodies and weights, and so on.
It doesn’t it reflect them as a mirror, but it is the absence which guarantees their presence. And it’s their presence which guarantees its absence. So there’s this mutual relationship—again, the mutual arising expression—between voidness and form, between existence and nonexistence, being and non-being.
These are never felt as alternatives or things that are in some kind of a contest. So then, when it is said that there is not any thinker behind thoughts, not any experiencer who has experiences, this is a way of saying that experiencing, knowing, is not an encounter between strangers. Western thought concentrates very much on knowledge as an encounter, and it is thus that we talk about “facing facts,” “facing reality,” as if somehow or other the knower and the known came from two completely different worlds and met each other like that.
Whereas actually, the phenomenon of knowledge is almost the precise opposite of that: instead of being a collision between two wandering bodies in space, knowledge is much more like the expansion of a flower from the stem in the bud, where the opposite points of the flower are the knower and the known. They are the terms of something which, as it were, lies between them. Let me repeat.
We tend—in all our metaphors and common speech—to think of life as an encounter between the knowing human being (the knowing mind) and the world. They think of it not as an encounter, but as an expression—not an impression—an expression of a process that has polarized itself coming out from the center and expressed itself in terms of opposites. But of course this is the basis of the whole yang-yin principle—you know, this jolly old thing—where you’ve got two interlocked (what are they) fishes?
Commas? It’s a fascinating emblem. They call it a monad, yes.
But there it is. This is a helix, essentially; this grip. And this is the formation of spiral nebulae.
And it’s the position of sexual intercourse. I, here—this is my “I”—and you, here, with your “I.” I’m trying to get to the middle of you, you’re trying to get to the middle of me. And neither one of us exists without the other.
This is yang, the white, and yin, the dark. The word “yang” originally means, or is associated with, the south side of a mountain which is sunny, “yin” the north side which is dark. “Yang” is the north bank of a river which gets the sun, “yin” is the south bank of a river which is in the shade.
Now, you see, you don’t get a mountain with only one side. The mountain—if it’s a mountain at all—goes up and down. It’s like the wave: you don’t get a wave which has a crest with no trough, or a trough with no crest.
You can’t have half a wave. So, yang and yin are quite different from each other. But just because they are different, they’re identical.
This is the important idea of the identical difference. The saying goes in both Taoism and Buddhism: “Difference is identity, identity is difference.” The Chinese word for “is” is not quite the same as our word. This word, which is usually used, has rather the meaning of “that.” So they would say, “Difference that identity, identity that difference.” And so this doesn’t mean quite “is exactly the same as,” it means rather “is in relation to,” or “goes with,” “necessarily involves.” “Difference necessarily involves identity, identity necessarily involves difference.” So yang and yin: there is no yang without yin, no yin without yang.
When I was first studying these things I was terribly bothered by how on earth I was going to see this multiple differentiated world as a unity. What what was going to happen? What would it be like to see that all things are one?
The sages keep saying all things are one, and they all look to me so different. Because here was all this chee-chee chee-chee chee-chee chee-chee going on around one, and it was doing it in different ways. All these people came on in different ways.
And they had all their houses, and all their cars, and all their this and that. And the whole world looked full of the most bony, prickly differences. And I thought, “Well, what’s supposed to happen?” Is there supposed to be a, kind of, as if your eyesight got blurred and all these things suddenly went bleaah and flowed together?
What is this experience of nirvāṇa, of liberation, et cetera, supposed to be? Because so many of these—especially Hindu—sages write about it as if it was just this kind of dissolution of everything. They said it all becomes like a slug with salt on it.
Well, it took me a long time. And suddenly, one day, I realized that the difference that I saw between things was the same thing as their unity. Because differences, borders, lines, surfaces, boundaries don’t really divide things from each other at all.
They join them together. Because all boundaries are held in common. It’s like—let’s think of a territory which has all been divided up into property.
Your property, my property, et cetera, et cetera. And there are the fences. But we hold that if I live next to you, your fence is my fence.
We hold the boundary in common. We may make up silly arrangements as to who is responsible for the maintenance of this fence, but nevertheless we hold our boundaries in common. And we wouldn’t know what my plot of land was, or where it was, unless we knew the definition of your plot of land, and your plot of land that is adjoining.
So boundaries are held in common. And I could see then that my sense of being “me” was exactly the same thing as my sensation of being one with the whole cosmos. I didn’t need to get some other weird, sort of different, odd kind of experience to feel in total connection with everything.
Once you get the clue, you see, that the sense of unity is inseparable from the sense of difference. You wouldn’t know yourself, or what you meant by “self,” unless at the same time you have the feeling of something other. Now, the secret is that “other” eventually turns out to be you.
I mean, that’s the element of surprise in life: when suddenly you find the thing most alien. We say now: what is most alien to us? Go out at night and look at the stars, and realize that they are millions and millions and billions of miles away.
Vast conflagrations out in space. And you can lie back and look at that. Whew!
Say, “Well! Surely I hardly matter. I’m just a tiny, tiny little peekaboo on this weird spot of dust called Earth.
And all that going on out there. Billions of years before I was born. Billions of years after I will die.” And nothing seems stranger to you than that, more different from you.
But there comes a point (if you watch long enough) when you’ll say, “Why, that’s me!” It’s the “other” that is the condition of your being yourself, as the back is the condition of being the front. And when you know that, you know you never die. So let’s have an intermission.
The philosophy of the Tao is one of the two great principal components of Chinese thought. There are, of course, quite a number of forms of Chinese philosophy, but there are two great currents which have thoroughly molded the culture of China, and they are Taoism and Confucianism. And they play a curious game with each other.
Let me start by saying something about Confucianism originating with Kongfuzi, or Confucius, who lived approximately a little after 630 BC. He’s often supposed to have been a contemporary of Lao Tzu, who is the supposed founder of the Taoist way, but it seems more likely that Lao Tzu lived later than 400 BC according to most modern scholars. Confucianism is not a religion.
It’s a social ritual and a way of ordering society, so much so that the first great Catholic missionary to China—Matteo Ricci, who was a Jesuit—found it perfectly consistent with his Catholicism to participate in Confucian rituals. Because he saw them as something of a kind of national character as one might pay respect to the flag, or something of that kind, in our own times. But he found that Confucianism involved no conflict with Catholicism, no commitment to any belief or dogma that would be at variance with the Catholic faith.
So Confucianism is an order of society and involves ideas of human relations including the government and the family based on the principle of what is called in Chinese rén (仁)—although Josh will notice that I never get my tones right—which is an extraordinarily interesting word. I’m going to put some of these things on the whiteboard. This is the word rén in Chinese, and it’s often translated “benevolence,” but that’s not a good translation at all.
This word means “human-heartedness.” That’s the nearest we can get to it in English. And it was regarded by Confucius as the highest of all virtues, but one that he always refused to define. It’s above righteousness and justice and propriety and other great Confucian virtues, and it involves the principle that human nature is a fundamentally good arrangement—including not only our virtuous side, but also our passionate side, also our appetites in our waywardness.
The Hebrews have a term which they call the yetzer hara, which means the wayward inclination (or what I like to call the element of irreducible rascality) that God put into all human beings—and put it there because it was a good thing: it was good for humans to have these two elements in them. And so a truly human-hearted person is a gentleman with a slight touch of rascality, just as one has to have salt in a stew. Confucius said the goody-goodies are the thieves of virtue—meaning that to try to be wholly righteous is to go beyond humanity, to try to be something that isn’t human.
So this gives Confucian approach to life and justice and all those sort of things a kind of queer humor. A sort of boys-will-be-boys attitude which is nevertheless a very mature way of handling human problems. It was, of course, for this reason that the Japanese Buddhist priests who visited China to study Buddhism, especially as Zen priests, introduced Confucianism into Japan.
Because despite certain limitations that Confucianism has—and it always needs the Tao philosophy as a counterbalance—Confucianism has been one of the most successful philosophies in all history for the regulation of governmental and family relationships. But, of course, it is concerned with formality. Confucianism prescribes all kinds of formal relationships: linguistic, ceremonial, musical, in etiquette, in all the spheres of morals, and for this reason has always been critted by the Taoists for being unnatural.
You need these two components, you see? And they play against each other beautifully in Chinese society. Roughly speaking, you see, the Confucian way of life is for people involved in the world.
The Taoist way of life is for people who get disentangled. Now, as we know in our own modern times, there are various ways of getting disentangled from the regular lifestyle—say, of the United States. If you want to go through the regular lifestyle of the United States, you go to high school and college, and then you go into a profession or a business, and you own a standard house and you raise a family and you have a car, or two cars, and do all that jazz.
But a lot of people don’t want to live that way. And there are lots of other ways of living besides that. So you could say that those of us who go along with the pattern correspond to the Confucians, and those who are Bohemians or bums or beatniks or whatever, and don’t correspond with the pattern, they are more like the Taoists.
Because the Taoist is really—actually, in Chinese history, Taoism is a way of life for older people. Lao Tzu, the name given to the founder of Taoism, means “the old boy.” And the legend is that when he was born he already had a white beard. So it’s sort of like this: that when you have contributed to society, when you’ve contributed children and brought them up, and you have assumed a certain role in social life, you then say: now it’s time for me to find out what it’s all about.
Who am I ultimately behind my outward personality? What is the secret source of things? And the latter half of life is the preeminently excellent time to find this out.
It’s something to do when you have finished with the family business. I am not saying that that is a sort of unavoidable, strict rule. Of course one can study the Tao when very young.
Because it contains all kinds of secrets in it as to the performance of every kind of art or craft or business or any occupation whatsoever. But it does—in China, in a way—it plays that role of a kind of safety valve for the more restricted way of life that Confucianism prescribes. And there is a sort of type in China who is known as the old rogue.
He’s a sort of intellectual bum, often found among scholars, who is admired very much and a type of character which had an influence on the development of the ideals of Zen Buddhist life. He is one, you see, who goes with nature rather than against nature. Well now, first of all, I’m going to talk about ideas which come strictly out of Lao Tzu’s book, the Tao Te Ching.
And of course the basic thing in the whole philosophy is the conception of Tao. This word has many meanings, and the book of Lao Tzu starts out by saying that “the Tao which can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” Or you can—there’s a pun in there which you can’t quite put into English; you can’t give all the meanings. Because the word “Tao” means both “the Way” (or course) of nature, or of everything.
It also means “to speak.” So the actual opening phrase of the book, following this word “Tao” is this. And the character is repeated again. You see?
And this character means “can be,” or “can,” “able,” something like that. So: “the way which can be.” Then give it its second meaning: “spoken,” “described,” “uttered.” But it also means the way that can be wayed. You know, you have to invent that word.
“The way that can be traveled”—perhaps—“is not the eternal way.” In other words, there is no way in which the Tao, or following the Tao—there’s no recipe for it. I can’t give you any do-it-yourself instructions, A-B-C-D, as to how it’s done. It is like when Louis Armstrong was asked: what is jazz?
He said: if you have to ask, you don’t know. Now, that’s awkward, isn’t it? But we can gather what it is by absorbing certain atmospheres and attitudes connected with those who follow it, and from the art and the poetry and all the expressions and the anecdotes and stories that illustrate the philosophy of the way.
So this word, then—“the way” or “the course of things”—is not… you must understand this: some Christian missionaries translated Tao as the lógos, taking as their point of departure the opening passage of St. John’s Gospel “in the beginning was the word.” Now, if you look up a Chinese translation of the Bible, it says: “In the beginning was the Tao. And the Tao was with God and the Tao was God. The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by it, and without it was not anything made that was made.” So they’ve substituted Tao there. Now, that’d make a very funny effect on a Chinese philosopher, because the idea of things being made by the Tao is absurd. The Tao is not a manufacturer and it’s not a governor.
It doesn’t rule, as it were, in the position of a king. Although the book, the Tao Te Ching, is written for many purposes, but one of its important purposes is as a manual of guidance for a ruler. And what it tells him is essentially: rule by not ruling.
Don’t lord it over the people. And so he says: In other words, the Tao doesn’t stand up and say: “I have made all of you, I have filled this Earth with its beauty and glory. Fall down before me in worship.” The Tao (having done anything, you know?)
always escapes and is not around to receive any thanks or acknowledgement, because it loves obscurity. And Lao Tzu said the Tao is like water: it always seeks the low level, which human beings abhor. So it’s a very mysterious idea.
Tao, then, is not really equivalent with any Western or Hindu idea of God. Because God is always associated with being the Lord. Even in India the Brahman is often called the supreme lord—although that term [is] more strictly applicable to Īśvara, the manifestation of Brahman in the form of a personal god.
But Bhagavān (the Lord); Kṛṣṇa, his song is the Bhagavad Gita, the song of the Lord. There’s always the idea of the king and the ruler attached, but not in the Chinese Tao philosophy. The Tao is not something different from nature, from ourselves, from our surrounding trees and waters and air.
The Tao is the way all that behaves. And so the basic Chinese idea of the universe is really that it’s an organism. And as we shall see when we get on to Zhuang Zhou—who is the sort of elaborator on Lao Tzu—he sees everything operating together so that nowhere can you find the controlling center.
There isn’t any. The world is a system of interrelated components, none of which can survive without each other. Just as in the case of bees and flowers: you will never find bees around in a place where there aren’t flowers, and you will never find flowers around in a place where there aren’t bees or insects that do the equivalent job.
And what that tells us secretly is that, although bees and flowers look different from each other, they’re inseparable. They (to use a very important Taoist expression) arise mutually. This is one of the great phrases from the second chapter of Lao Tzu’s book, where he says—this character means “to have” or “to be.” And this next one is a very important character in Taoist philosophy.
It means “no,” “negative”—wu (無) in Chinese—“not to be.” And then this curious expression for which we don’t have a really good corresponding idea in traditional Western thought. So: “to be and not to be mutually arise.” This character is based on the picture of a plant, something that grows out of the ground. So you could say: positive and negative, to be and not to be, yes and no, light and dark arise mutually; come into being.
There’s no cause and effect, it’s not that relationship at all. It’s like the egg and the hen. So as the bees and the flowers coexist in the same way as high and low, back and front, long and short, loud and soft, all those experiences are experienceable only in terms of their polar experience.
So the Chinese idea of nature is that all the various species arise mutually because they interdepend. And this total system of interdependence is the Tao. It involves certain other things that go along with Tao, but this mutual arising is the key idea to the whole thing.
And it is—if you want to understand Chinese and Oriental thought in general—it is the most important thing to grasp. Because, you see, we think so much in terms of cause and effect. We think of the universe today in Aristotelian and Newtonian ways, and in that philosophy the world is all separated.
It’s like a huge amalgamation of billiard balls. And they don’t move until struck by another or by a cue, and so everything is going tock-tock-tock-tock, tock-tock-tock-tock, tock-tock-tock-tock all over the place—one thing starting off another in a mechanical way. But of course, from the standpoint of twentieth-century science, we know perfectly well now that that’s not the way it works.
We know enough about relationships to see that that mechanical model which Newton devised was alright for certain purposes, but it breaks down now. Because we understand relativity, and we see how things go together in a kind of connected net rather than in a chain of billiard balls banging each other around. So in in the philosophy of the Tao it is said—it’s always being said; you read this in every art book about Chinese art—that in Chinese painting man is always seen as in nature rather than dominating it.
You get a painting entitled “Poet Drinking by Moonlight,” and you see a great landscape and, after some search with a magnifying glass, at last you see the poet stuck away in a corner somewhere, drinking wine. Whereas if we painted the subject “Poet Drinking by Moonlight,” the poet would be the most obvious thing in the picture. There he would be, dominating the whole thing, and the landscape off somewhere behind him.
But all the Chinese painters put man—I mean the painters of the great classical tradition. There are Chinese painters who specialize in family portraits and do these very formal paintings of someone’s ancestor sitting on a throne. It’s quite a different category.
But the Taoist-inspired painters, Zen-inspired painters, have this view of man as an integral part of nature—something in it, just as everything else is in it (flowers and birds), and not there, sent into this world, commissioned by some sort of supernatural being, to come into this world and farm it and dominate it. So then, the whole conception of nature is as a self-regulating, self-governing—indeed, democratic—organism. But it has a totality.
It all goes together. And this totality is the Tao. When we can speak in Taoism of “following the course of nature,” “following the way,” what it means is more like this: doing things in accordance with the grain.
It doesn’t mean you don’t cut wood, but it means that you cut wood along the lines where wood is most easy to cut. And you interact with other people along lines which are the most genial. And this, then, is the great fundamental principle which is called wúwéi: “not to force anything.” I think that’s the best translation.
It’s often called “not doing,” “not acting,” “not interfering.” But “not to force” seems to me to hit the nail on the head. Like, don’t ever force a lock; you’ll bend the key or break the lock. You jiggle until it revolves.
So wúwéi is always to act in accordance with the pattern of things as they exist. Don’t impose on any situation a kind of interference that is not really in accordance with the situation. For example: we have a slum, and the people are in difficulty and so on, and they need better housing.
Now, if you go in with a bulldozer and knock the slum down, and you put in its place by some architect’s imaginative notions of what is a super-efficient highrise apartment building to store people, you create a total mess. Utter chaos. A slum has what we would call an ecology.
It has a very complex system of relationships going in it by which the thing is already a going concern, even though it isn’t going very well. Anybody who wants to alter that situation must first of all become sensitive to all the conditions and relationships going on there. It’s terribly important, then, to have this feeling of the interdependence of every form of life upon every other form of life.
How we, for example, cultivate animals that we eat, and look after them, and build them up, and see that they breed in reasonable quantities. We don’t do it too well, as a matter of fact; especially troubles are rising about supplies of fish in the ocean. All sorts of things.
But you have to see that life, that the so-called conflict of various species with each other, is not actually a competition. It’s a very strange system of interrelationship, of things feeding on each other and cultivating each other at the same time—the idea of the friendly enemy, the necessary adversary who is part of you. You have conflicts going on in your own body: all kinds of microorganisms are eating each other up.
And if that wasn’t happening you wouldn’t be healthy. So all those interrelationships, whether they appear to be friendly relationships (as between bees and flowers) or conflicting relationships (as between birds and worms), they are actually forms of cooperation. And that is mutual arising.